We mourn our craft
March 4, 2026
I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it.
I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.
I observed in my piece about the structure of scientific revolutions and the transformation that software engineering is undergoing right now that these periods of transformation bring about a lot of grief. Because an old way, a whole practice, a whole set of beliefs is largely obsoleted. Things that we’ve invested our life in, skills and knowledge, capability, seem overnight to become irrelevant.
Annie Vella wrote eloquently about this around a year ago in the software identity crisis, At a time when many felt, or at least were trying to prove themselves, that this transformation wasn’t real, it wasn’t happening, it was a chimera, that these models were never going to be good enough to replace us as the people who write the code.
As has been observed elsewhere, something happened in late 2025 that finally put any doubt about that to rest. And so we see a wave of this grief now being expressed in social media and in posts like this.
It’s not to diminish how powerful these feelings are and how legitimate they are, but as Nolan Lawson observes here too, it’s something of a luxury for most folks, perhaps, other than those right near the end of their careers. For everyone else, it’s a reality we need to face up to, one way or the other.
